Rally Partners With GitHub to Encourage Enterprise Open Source

Today Boulder-based Agile development support shop Rally is announcing a new partnership with GitHub, the version control system and code repository, that will help Rally in its live Hackathon running this week. The Hackathon partners Rally’s in-house engineers with developers from its client pool. Long-term, the partnership will also be beneficial for both companies, by helping Rally build out its library of available apps for its Agile application lifecycle management platform, and by helping GitHub reach more enterprise customers, where Rally already has a strong presence.

BetaKit spoke to Rally VP of Products Todd Olson in an interview to talk about what the GitHub partnership means for his company, which also distributes the popular AgileZen project management software platform. He told us the pairing was a natural one, and should help Rally improve its value proposition for customers by helping expand the potential pool of add-on software available to its clients.

“We’re hoping for this Hackathon to become the first of several around the world, and everything, all the code, all the apps that are produced are going to go on a public GitHub repository that people can fork and share and really build a community around,” he said. “So this really signifies our commitment to building a really open and extended community around the Rally platform.”

Rally’s software is designed to help development teams work and coordinate across teams, providing services like resource, project and quality management. Rally encourages developers to build their own apps for the Rally platform, and is introducing its new AppSDK 2.0 alongside the GitHub partnership to make that process easier. Olson said that GitHub just makes sense as a Rally partner in this regard.

“The partnership with GitHub is certainly natural, code repositories are kind of a key integration with us,” he said. “As part of this announcement we’re also announcing integration with GitHub, so if you check in to GitHub and you’re a Rally user you’ll see some of that information in Rally as well.”

Rally will also be hosting all of its 100 pre-built apps, designed in-house for customers to use and remix for their own installations, on GitHub as well, making it easier for their clients and others to see how they were built, and to modify for their own use.

When asked about the financial arrangements involved in the deal with GitHub, Olson revealed that basically as it stands the partnership is designed around mutual benefit, with no money changing hands. For San Francisco-based GitHub, which was founded in 2008 and doesn’t have the same degree of enterprise penetration as business-focused Rally, the advantage is greater institutional presence at Fortune 500 companies and Rally customers like Disney and McGraw-Hill.

GitHub currently offers an enterprise-focused product, aptly named GitHub:Enterprise, but integration with Rally will help introduce it to new silos and companies where it doesn’t yet have significant name recognition. In helping Rally focus on providing tools for individual coders and stay current with contemporary programming practice, GitHub gets to associate its brand with that company’s established reputation as a service provider for large corporations.